Jon Kortajarena turns two decades inside fashion and beauty into SMTHELSE, a haircare brand exploring how conscious formulas can reduce excess without compromising performance.
Before the campaigns, film sets and fashion houses, Jon Kortajarena’s first reference was his mother’s salon. There, he saw how hair could affect confidence. More than twenty years spent around leading hairstylists, beauty teams and fashion houses later, that early memory becomes SMTHELSE, a new brand built around a simple question: how much do we actually need from a beauty product?
Short for Something Else, SMTHELSE proposes consuming less and choosing better through formulas designed to combine professional performance with reduced resources. Its concentrated range contains up to 75 percent less water, while a 100 ml tube is designed to perform like 300 ml of conventional shampoo and deliver approximately 50 washes. The collection extends across daily care, scalp treatments and styling, with products created for different hair types and without gender conventions.
Reduction, however, does not mean stripping beauty of pleasure. Sensoriality remains central to the project, particularly through ‘Famara’, the signature fragrance developed with French perfumer Patrice Revillard. Inspired by Kortajarena’s memories of Lanzarote, it moves from grapefruit and Spanish cypress to roasted hazelnut, vetiver and coffee, settling into cedarwood, moss and white musk.
That combination gives SMTHELSE its most interesting proposition. Conscious beauty becomes less about adding another sustainable label to the shelf and more about reconsidering quantity, formulation and use. Kortajarena translates years spent observing the industry into a brand where performance is expected to justify consumption, and where choosing better begins by asking whether more is necessary at all.
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